The Art of Settling

When it dawns on you that you’re eventually going to have to settle, all your childhood dreams of holding out for prince charming go out the window. There’s nothing wrong with settling, except that we’ve been taught all of our lives how special we are and how we must wait for all the sparks and feelings to know who we should marry. What happens instead is that we are more discriminatory in our youth and weed out potential partners based off of whims and fancies that are not grounded in reality. Perhaps it was because our parents never got that chance to really explore that they told us this. What happens is that when you reach a certain age, like exactly 28, you’re like ‘oh shit, I need to get married by the age of 30 or I’ll be too old to have kids by 35,’ and then you have to settle. Some people are okay with it and some people become quite bitter. You have to realize that with the limited time frame you do have to find a partner, you’re going to have to settle. If you did get sparks and fireworks, good for you, but in the long run, they all wear off anyways. What we should’ve been told was to develop who we are and to find the qualities we want in a partner, and that settling is okay.

I settle. You settle. We all settle. It’s fine. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can enjoy life and not worry about achieving the perfect life. Let’s face it, we all know that one bachelor or bachelorette that is forever single and is still trying to get with someone and is super creepy now. I’m not talking about the ones who have had a hard time finding someone or the people who never wanted a partner to begin with, but the ones who have no trouble with the opposite sex, but just refuse to settle. That’s what not settling looks like. You’re just a creeper now because you’re chasing after a dream. There is no perfect guy or girl out there and you will never find them until you start to accept people’s faults. Settling does not mean giving up on a great partner, it only means giving up on your ideas of what a great partner should be. Life is meant to be lived, not imagined.

Here is what settling is and isn’t. Settling does not mean accepting abusive behavior or destructive traits. It does not mean prolonging a relationship that clearly can’t be revived. Settling is lowering your expectations of what a person should be and allowing yourself to accept them for who they are. We are all imperfect beings seeking love in all the wrong places and we should be a bit more forgiving. Because, frankly, I’m not special and you’re not special, but it’s the bond that you create with each other that can become special. That’s the only magic you’ll ever need in your life, so forget all the things you heard as a kid, because fairy tales don’t tell you about how many days Cinderella bitched at the prince for not coming after her when her shoe fell off. I mean, you looked into my goddamned eyes and now you have to put a shoe on my foot to recognize me? You better believe he’ll never hear the end of that.